Eugene Water and Electric Board revives fish ladder proposal

Oregon Wild presses EWEB to install modern equipment on McKenzie River dams to aid salmon and steelhead.

In response to protests from fish agencies, environmental groups and even one of its own elected officials, the Eugene Water & Electric Board is taking a second look at building a fish ladder at Trail Bridge Dam.

However, a proposal to trap and haul threatened fish around the dam will still appear on a formal license application to be submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission later this month, EWEB officials say.

Environmental spokesmen and others responded with cautious enthusiasm Thursday, praising EWEB's possible change of heart but voicing some skepticism about whether the utility really means it.

"Endangered fish in the McKenzie (River) deserve the best, and a fish ladder is about the best we can expect," said Doug Heiken, conservation and restoration coordinator for Oregon Wild. "(But) people are not convinced that this is a real change or that EWEB is serious about a fish ladder."

By not listing the fish ladder as its preferred option on the license application, EWEB is "telling the federal government that they're going to do the wrong thing for the fisheries resource," said Bill Kloos, a Eugene land use attorney active in fisheries issues. "What EWEB is saying is, `We're going to count on other parties in the relicensing proceedings to spend a lot of time and energy beating us up and pushing us into doing the right thing.' "

EWEB officials, however, say they are confident that an acceptable agreement will be reached when the utility and fish agencies begin holding a series of "settlement discussions" in January. More technical analysis is needed, they say, before a fish ladder can be cited as a preferred strategy.

At a meeting between EWEB commissioners and Eugene City Council members on Wednesday, EWEB General Manager Randy Berggren said the trap-and-haul strategy should be viewed as a "placeholder" in the license application, and that EWEB has made a new commitment "to aggressively look" at ways to build a fish ladder for upstream fish.

Berggren's comments came in response to a question from Councilor Gary Pap<142>, a city liaison to the McKenzie Watershed Council and a critic of EWEB's trap-and-haul proposal. Other opponents of the trap-and-haul approach include federal and state fish agencies, a consortium of area environmental groups and EWEB President Sandra Bishop.

Bishop last month voted against a resolution authorizing EWEB to go forward with efforts to secure a new license for the Carmen-Smith Hydroelectric Project on the upper McKenzie River. The utility's license expires in November 2008.

After pondering initial estimates of around $20 million for a fish ladder, EWEB officials proposed a trap-and-haul plan that they said would be just as effective in moving fish upstream but at less than half the cost.

EWEB has looked at building a ladder that would run through the earthen dam or over it. Safety concerns make the first option unlikely, however; concerns about an over-the-dam ladder, meanwhile, include whether fish would have the ability to come and go as they like, and the need to continually pump water into the ladder.

Steve Newcomb, EWEB's environmental manager, said the utility is taking another hard look at the over-the-dam model, and also is exploring a third option: building a ladder along an embankment that would then tunnel through an adjacent hillside into Trail Bridge Reservoir.

Newcomb said the latter option would increase the cost of the ladder by at least $4 million and perhaps much more. Part of EWEB's concern, he said, is that higher costs for Trail Bridge fish passage could come at the expense of other desired improvements in the Carmen-Smith project.

The Trail Bridge Reservoir and dam are the final links in the Carmen-Smith project, which consists of three dams and reservoirs, two large water tunnels and a pair of power plants near the McKenzie River's headwaters.

EWEB has said the costs related to securing a new 30- to 50-year license could reach $100 million, much of it acquired through ratepayer-financed borrowing. Aside from a possible fish ladder, the other big cost item is a fish screen that EWEB proposes to build at Trail Bridge.

Josh Laughlin, executive director of the Cascadia Wildlands Project, said he welcomes EWEB's possible move to a fish ladder but worries that a narrow focus on Trail Bridge is precluding consideration of fish enhancement measures farther upstream at Smith and Carmen.

But Jeff Ziller, fish biologist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in Springfield, said Trail Bridge is the highest priority because it serves two known threatened species of fish: spring chinook and bull trout.

Ziller said Trail Bridge Dam is one of only a few dams in the Willamette Basin that's conducive to a fish ladder - measuring 80 to 90 feet high instead of the 200- to 400-foot heights associated with large flood-control dams.

"There may be some costs involved in making sure dam safety is not an issue, but the ability to construct a fish ladder there is very doable," he said.